Comic-Con #11: 'Sucker Punch'

I expected SUCKER PUNCH to blow my mind, and think perhaps I was expecting too much. It still looks cool, but not necessarily what I expected. Not long ago, I suggested on Twitter that, with new technology, it was time to cinematically revisit TANK GIRL. Drew McWeeny tweeted back that I should wait till I got a good look at SUCKER PUNCH. I see what he means… But I still want a new TANK GIRL. Regardless, I’ll be checking this one out at some point. Zack Snyder comes out, says he’s been working on this idea for 8 years. It has been “an amazing journey I wanted to torture these girls with.” Happy it got greenlit despite being an original concept and “not based on a breakfast cereal, or Superglue, which could be cool. A Superglue movie — maybe we’ll do that one next.”

– Close-up of eyes. “Close your eyes and open your mind.” A SIN CITY-type car with “Sucker Punch” written in water on the rain-streaked windows. It’s heading for an asylum that looks like an Edward Gorey drawing.

– Asylum cafeteria, in a high-ceiling room. Catfight!

– Browning undergoing hypnosis, with a Polish accented Gugino as her doctor.

– Browning scrubbing floors, like Cinderella almost.

Now bear with me, because here’s where it starts to get crazy, and this is by no means a comprehensive description. We enter the dream world, which is in bright colors — or is it multiple dream worlds? There’s a Japanese dojo with Scott Glenn as a KILL BILL-type character. A World War I fantasy, where giant robot mech-suits shoot down biplanes. The planet Saturn. A sword-and-sorcery world with a dragon. Giant monster samurai. Armies of robots. An exploding blimp. Moulin Rouge burlesque (actually, imagine MOULIN ROUGE as a war movie, and you’re close to the tone and look of this footage).

My main reservation is that the virtual worlds don’t look quite real; they reminded me of several Japanese fantasy movies like DEVILMAN, where the imagination is there but the technology/budget isn’t quite up to it. This is not fully finished footage, however. They have until next March to polish it.

Snyder says there’s a twist ending; also feels like the acting and story is strong enough that he could cut out all the action and it would still work.

Chung liked that she got to learn how to fly a plane and a helicopter.

Browning says the girls are genuinely tough in the movie. It’s not a parody of girls fighting; the fights are brutally staged. It’s the same choreographer as 300/WATCHMEN, but Snyder says “we did stuff in this movie we’ve never done before” in terms of fight scenes.

Asked if he prefers adapting properties or writing his own stuff, Snyder says they’re the same, because once you have the script in hand, all movies are adaptations that he wants to be faithful to. He likes movies with layered realities, but says that every movie is complicated in its own way.

He thinks the movie has a chance of being PG-13, as most of the violence is directed against robots, monsters, and zombies. Is working now on the 300 sequel XERXES, which Frank Miller is drawing.